geekosystem

By now you may have heard of Google Instant? You may have been surprised by it. You may have used it, a number of times over. But have you heard of YouTube instant? YouTube Instant is was created this week by Feross Aboukhadijeh, and it is exactly what it sounds like. A real-time search bar for YouTube, utilizing the search suggestions that pop up when you use the search bar on YouTube.com. What ever is on the top gets searched, and the first result starts playing. This attracted the attention of none other than Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of Youtube.

With Apple's announcement that the white version of the iPhone 4 has proved "more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected," comes the inevitable question: Well, what the heck does that mean? Is it something with the glass? Are they delaying to fix the antennae problem? TechCrunch points out that it doesn't really matter which reason you pick. If the white iPhone is really as delayed as Apple seems to say it is, it's going to be bad for the product.

Earlier this week Microsoft announced that they would be handing a Windows phone 7 device to each of its 90,000 employees, presumably for reasons related to morale and employee familiarity with product, but also probably to reduce the number of pictures taken of Microsoft employees enjoying their iPhones (taken, naturally, with iPhones). One other reason his been revealed in a memo from Microsoft Mobile head Andy Lees to employees:

There is also a lot you can do while we are heading to launch even before you get your phone including... Develop! With the help of the developer division, we just shipped the Final Beta of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. They absolutely rock, and you should download them now http://developer.windowsphone.com/. The package includes everything you need to start building apps. In addition, we’ve introduced a new employee developer program which makes it much easier for you to develop apps for Marketplace in your spare time.

The company wants to artificially jump start its app community, using the free time of its employees. Uh, yeeahh...

It's official. The 2010 World Cup is the biggest thing to ever happen to the internet, ever. According to Akamai.com's Net Usage Index, net traffic on the first day of the World Cup surpassed the former leading event (Barack Obama's presidential election victory) by 30%. Some of the inevitable consequences of this have been noticed by internet users. Twitter, for example, prone to hiccups on a good day, has been flying the Fail Whale to and fro. The Globe & Mail reports on one strange side effect of the increase in traffic: a twitter campaign to save a rare Brazilian parrot. So rare, in fact, that does not actually exist.

Not Apple, and, oddly enough, not Google, but Microsoft. Gizmodo's article says that while the Kin, Microsoft's "smart" phone aimed at the teenage texter, is not a good product, it contains a bit of software, Studio, that is something greater than the sum of its parts. The networking phone uploads everything created with it (photos, videos, texts, etc.) and displays them simply, beautifully, and chronologically on the internet. This Studio can be accessed from anywhere.

Kin Studio bears all the hallmarks of a pilot program, with a limited scope of ambition—there's no outgoing email or SMS component, nor is it particularly powerful as a photo management tool—as well as a severely limited deployment. If the Kin sells at all, it'll be to a narrow slice of the population. A sample group, basically. This sample group will glimpse the future of Microsoft, and without knowing it, the future of how we use gadgets.

We already knew that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating whether Apple "unfairly dominates" the sale of digital music; contacting officials in the music industry as well as online music vendors. Now the New York Post's sources say that the probe is a bit broader than originally thought.

According to several sources, the Justice Dept. has contacted a handful of the country's biggest media and technology companies to get their views on Apple, which, after years of casting itself as the tiny outsider, has become an 800-pound gorilla calling the shots in several arenas.

There's a lot of talk these days about Facebook's radical steps to redefine what it's users can expect regarding their privacy. But are all that many people really leaving Facebook?

I haven't, even after reading all of this stuff. The thought process, which happens at least once with every new development, goes like this: "I should probably leave Facebook. ...But what would I replace it with? Well, I'll just go double check all my privacy settings again." There isn't anything else out there that does what Facebook does, with the community that Facebook has.

Danah Boyd has a very interesting article up on Apophenia regarding this feeling. In a nutshell, her point is this: Facebook succeeded in its goal of becoming a utility. But guess what? Utilities get regulated.

Attention all college students, professors, and school employees:

Google would like to offer you the Google Voice Beta. It doesn't even look like there's a time limit on this, but if graduation is coming up for you you might want to jump on it: you need an e-mail address that ends in .edu. The service also only works in America.

The reasons behind this, according to the Google Voice Blog:

We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students... But since Google Voice is currently only available by invite, a lot of students are still listening to voicemail and sending text messages the old-fashioned way.... So starting today, we’ll be giving priority Google Voice invites to students.

In a comparatively tame social-networking-gone-bad story, Jim Breyer, a member of Facebook's board of directors, had his Facebook account hacked, and then used to send out a phishing e-mail. It's not that tame, though, considering that there are only four people on Facebook's board of directors, Breyer, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, so he's actually one of the bigger names in charge of the network. The hack wound up sending spam to some of his more than 2,300 friends.

It seems that after months of tense negotiating and drawn ultimatums, Zynga may be removing itself from Facebook in order to run on its own service, Zynga Live.

According to Techcrunch, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced to employees

that Zynga was going to launch a social game network called Zynga Live. The Zynga Live initiative was a social gaming network. Facebook and Zynga has been negotiating on Facebook Credits and the talks turned for the worst. In the negotiation process, Facebook shut off Zynga\’s feeds and threatened to shut down games. Zynga in the process threatened to completely leave Facebook and prepared to do so in the previous upcoming weeks.

All a part of the Great Facebook Deactivation wave of 2010?

A lot has been said, raged, and ranted about the iPhone and iPad's incompatibility with Flash. On Friday, the movement away from Flash grew significantly larger when Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 will also leave Flash video by the wayside. While Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch cited Flash's problems with reliability, security, and performance, Steve Jobs took a more militant approach: statistics.

Of the 75% of internet video that is in Flash, he said "almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads."

Well, you know what Mark Twain would say. So how much truth is there to Jobs' numbers? Techcrunch has done some digging.

Hot on the heals of a near complete accidental reveal of the iPhone 4G, 9 To 5 Mac noticed that for a little while this morning there were two strange iPod Touches with strange built-in cameras and a strange operating system on eBay.

Strangely, the auction was swiftly pulled.

Engadget has some "photos which made their way into [their] hands" that look a whole lot like an iPhone that no one's ever seen before. It could, quite possibly, be a prototype or production model for the patiently anticipated iPhone 4G or iPhone HD. They say the phone was found on the floor of a San Jose bar inside an iPhone 3G case. So, uh, that's not sketchy at all. If it turns out to be an unannounced next generation iPhone, I hope the story of how it got there is suitably epic. Anyway, specs on this mysterious device after the jump.

Electronics retailer Micro Center has received part numbers for four new Mac computers, which it says corresponds with three 15" and one 17" MacBook Pros. From MacRumors.com:

We've since received independent confirmation from another source besides Microcenter that those part numbers are real, and that we should expect new 15" and 17" MacBook Pros very soon.

This Thursday, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, posted a copy of a letter he wrote to the FBI on H-Net. In it, he reports what he considers to be a breach of child pornography laws willfully perpetrated by Wikimedia Commons, the parent of Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and, of course, Wikipedia.

The clearest instances I found (I did not want to look for long) are linked from [the pedophilia page] and [the lolicon page]. I don't know if there is any more, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is--the content on the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and various others, are truly vast.

You can see on [the history of the category page] that the page has existed for three years. Considering that Eric Moeller, a high-level Wikipedia manager, is well known for his views in defense of pedophilia... surely the existence of this page must have come to the attention of those with the legal responsibility for the Wikimedia projects.